A Cocoa-devmailing list thread popped up recently wondering how to make SOAP calls on an Apple platform. If you follow it through to the conclusion, you’ll learn that Patrick decided to roll his own: he’s got a base class which communicates with the server and triggers the actual serialization via simple string patterns or simple xml parsing.

This is almost exactly what I’m doing. The biggest difference is that he’s using NSXMLParser and I’m using TouchXML.

My question: how many times are developers going to have to write the same code over and over again in isolation before Apple adds a decent SOAP API to all of their platforms? Web services aren’t going away. Microsoft isn’t going away. And as long as developers are using Microsoft’s stack to write web services, we’re going to have to consume SOAP. Microsoft’s tools just make it far too trivial to do SOAP for it to fade into obscurity any time soon.